Institution name with full postal address and email address for correspondence

The abstract should be no more than 200 words summarising the most important points of the study. Any introductory statement should be brief. No subheadings are needed. Tables, graphs and illustrations are not allowed.

New paragraphs should have a single tab indent. Outline the research question or hypothesis; describe the study design with the number of patients, age and mean (range) follow-up time; describe the results and indicate what new information this study brings to the literature.

Standard papers will be allocated 4 minutes for presentation, allowing time for brief introduction and discussion slides. Further discussion will be prompted by questions from the floor. If your work is complex and requires more than 4 minutes for presentation, please make this clear with your submission so that the local organiser can decide whether to allocate more time.

The local organiser will circulate all submitted abstracts to colleagues for scoring, and will inform you if your abstract has been accepted for presentation.

If accepted, it is crucial that you (or a nominated replacement) are available to attend the meeting and present your paper. You should also try to ensure that the senior author of the paper is available to attend.

Due to rising publication costs SWOC abstracts are no longer submitted to the BJJ for online publication. SWOC is looking into alternative publication avenues. Abstracts should continue to be formatted in the BJJ style.